We wanted to conclude APW Pride Week with an LGBTQ perspective Ask Team Practical. That, of course, required that we bring in the big guns, because all of the current APW staff is in mixed gender relationships. So! Today’s ATP is a collaboration between Alyssa and Michelle, two theatre loving liberal Texans, which makes y’all pretty lucky. And while the questions are specifically aimed at those of you planning gay weddings, they are so thought provoking for those of us that are not. So girls, let’s do it….

While all of our ATP questions can apply to anyone, regardless of orientation, there are just some issues that LGBTQ couples face that hetero couples will hardly, if ever, have to deal with. (Not fair, huh? We shouldprobablydosomethingaboutthat.) In order to answer some of those, we enlisted Michelle of Deborah and Michelle of So You’re En-GAY-ged. She is adorable, I love her, and I want her and Deborah to adopt me and let me watch geeky TV with them forever and ever, amen.

We came up with a list of questions that LGBTQ couples face and while a straight couple reading this might go, “Hey, we have that problem,” remember that an LGBTQ couple reading this will go, “Hey. We have nearly ALL those problems.” Here’s to the day when this list doesn’t exist. Take it away, Michelle!!

Step 3: Open as many sites as you can manage without going crazy in the tabs of your internet browser.

Step 4: Find that *one* photographer that has music playing on their site and turn it off. Seriously, who thinks Taylor Swift’s “Today was a Fairytale” is appropriate for a website? If you can’t find the mute button on their site, just eliminate them from your search. You don’t need them anyway.

Step 5: Do some old fashioned super-sleuthing! Key elements to look for on any website include gender neutral language and photos of other LGBTQ couples in their portfolio. Tip: Any reference to marriage between a man and woman? Be a Dalek and EXTERMINATE that site.

Step 6:Whittle it down to the few photographers you like and if you can’t figure out if they are LGBTQ inclusive or not, just send them an email and ask. The worst possible scenario is an annoying email from said photographer who disagrees with you. Then you have the pleasure of just deleting their email and badmouthing them on Facebook. No, don’t do that last part– just delete the email and tell your friends not to hire them… though, if it were to be via Facebook I wouldn’t judge you.

Not the investigating type? That’s okay, not everyone can be Mulder or Scully (or Bones/Booth depending on your age and coolness level). The following websites have vendors who actively seek out LGBTQ friendly vendors:

So You’re En-GAY-ged (I know, personally, they have a super legit criteria for their vendors! And I can vouch that the ones on there are fantastic)

How do I find an officiant when I don’t want a church or courthouse wedding?

While searching your local directories or listings can be helpful, most sites don’t have an officiant section. Try mainstream wedding sites; Wedding Wire and The Kn*t both have search capabilities for officiants, (and on Wedding Wire you can actually read past reviews.)

You can also have a friend officiate the ceremony and have them ordained by Universal Life Church which will allow them to legally sign your marriage certificate! If you are having your ceremony in a lame state like mine that doesn’t recognize gay marriage, then two things: 1. GOOD FOR YOU! 2. Don’t go through the processing fees of ULC unless your soon-to-be-officiating friend really really wants to.

If you don’t have friends who are comfortable in front of crowds, you may want to try and find an official person who oversees weddings all the time. When you meet with them, make sure to ask your potential wedding master or mistress of ceremonies how many LGBTQ weddings they have done. Ask for sample scripts and read them before you send in the deposit check.

I have blogged about my search for our officiant on So You’re En-GAY-ged and used the following types of questions to see if she was right for us.

What is their stance on gay marriage?

How long have they been officiating and how many LGBTQ ceremonies have they done?

What are their general fees? Do they have any extra fees? (Travel, customized readings, etc.)

How do they structure their ceremony? Will you be able to pick readings? Do they have samples that you can look at?

How do you honor your family without making your partner feel like shit when their family won’t be there?

Personal back story: When I came out to my father and step-mother, my father’s response was “Why are you crying? No, please, stop crying! Why would this ever change how much I love you?” When Deborah and I first started dating, my father immediately invited her over to our monthly family dinner and she quickly became an important part of my parent’s life. On the flip side, when Deborah came out, her family wanted to have a family dinner of another kind– one that involved discussing what went wrong in her life and how sad she must be that she has resorted to this ‘lifestyle’. Needless to say, that dinner never happened, but I understand the complications of having one family be completely supportive of your marriage and sexuality while the other is less than… um, nice. My wife’s family was a big ol’ detour sign on our road to wedded bliss, so I can answer this question from a personal standpoint. However, every relationship is different, and I don’t know your partner as well as you do, so remember that all of these suggestions may not be applicable.

Be pro-active. Talk to your partner about how he/she is feeling and how you are feeling. You may think your significant other is wallowing in self-pity, but I found that Deborah had come to terms with her parents unwillingness to participate in our wedding much sooner than I had. Once we had that discussion, we were able to plan accordingly. We both knew there would be some sadness when it came to wedding milestones, like finding a dress for instance. We made sure there were tons of loving and supportive people around when Deborah did find her dress and we ended up turning the whole day into a big celebration.

Word your invitations carefully.We chose “We, Michelle and Deborah, along with the loving support of (my parental’s names) are super excited to be getting married”. You can also go with “Together with our families” which may not be entirely true, but it depends on your definition of family. If you are paying for your wedding yourself, you don’t even have to include parent’s names on the invitation. I’ve even seen an adorable invite where the couple’s pets are the ones inviting guests to the wedding. Done correctly, animals writing in first person is pretty freakin’ great.

Revamp traditions. Deborah’s middle brother walked her down the aisle, but my father offered to walk both of us. We also considered walking down the aisle together. Ms. Awesome Weds had a brilliant idea (which I would have stolen if our venue didn’t have a cement sidewalk of an aisle with a clear focal point) of having the aisle be the middle of a circle, so she and her wife walked down the aisle at the same time. We also did things a little differently than the traditional, ‘Who gives the woman to be married’ thing. Deborah and her brother waited at the end of the aisle, and when my father and I walked up we did a big family hug, and then began the ceremony.

Forget ‘sides’. Traditionally, there is a bride’s side and groom’s side– or a bride’s side and bride’s side, or groom’s side and groom’s side. In my opinion, sides are silly. If two families are coming together to be one, then they can all sit together. This is especially great when one family may not be all that present during the celebration.

Be polite.You probably don’t want to send your partner’s parents a wedding invitation. I know I didn’t. After all, what was the benefit? A depressing phone call or email? Seeing, in ink, that they won’t be attending? That isn’t exactly a picker-upper piece of mail. However, it is good in the long run. I know that we did everything we could to make Deborah’s family feel welcome at our wedding. Now, ten years from now when we are still married and they have come to terms with the fact that they missed their daughter’s wedding, we won’t feel guilty for not extending the invitation for them to join us.

How do we handle well-meaning, but stupid questions?

Honesty is the best policy. If the questions are well-meaning but a little annoying, remember that not everyone in your life has attended a gay wedding. This may be a first (an awesome one, btw) for a lot of your guests! Speak from your heart and tell your family the truth.

If you do get sick of answering the same question over and over again, you may want to think about putting up an LGBTQ Wedding FAQ on your wedding site. This way, when your Aunt Edna, twice removed, asks who is the bride and who is the groom, you can give a quick “We are both brides (or grooms)” and then direct her to your website for a more detailed answer. If you do want to have a FAQ, these are the top three questions we got asked all the freakin’ time along with their answers.

Are you both wearing dresses? Yes, we both have always wanted to wear a dress on our wedding day. No, they will not be matching dresses because that would be weird.

Who is wearing a tux? Our male bridesmates will be wearing suits. We are requesting that no tuxes be worn, as it is Texas and quite warm… even in November.

Can y’all even get married here? No, sadly, LGBTQ couples are not granted the same rights and privileges as straight couples in our state. Even though our marriage won’t be legal, we still consider it an important milestone of our relationship and are honoring the legality of marriage through older marriage rituals like hand fasting. Please understand that, to us, this is the exact same as a legal wedding. We will also be signing a marriage certificate and encourage guests to sign as witnesses to our marriage.

How do I change or hyphenate my name?

Are you living in a state that recognizes your marriage? Well, then I am super jealous and it should be super easy, because you can just change it. Look at the website Ms. Now Mrs., it does all of the paperwork for you for a small fee. Snazzy, no? Even when I contacted them and they *couldn’t* help me, they were super polite and informative. [Editor’s Note: I used it and it was completely worth it. – Alyssa] If you are a Texas reader, you can see a detailed list of what is necessary for changing names over here at SYE where I did a little bloggy-blog about it.

I hate to be Debbie Downer about this, but unless you live in a state that legally recognizes your union, changing your name is going to cost you a crap ton of money. You and your partner will have to file legal paperwork if you are hyphenating and there are lots of legal fees associated with this course of action. Up Side: You don’t have to have a lawyer to change your name. You can find the correct documents needed on LegalZoom. Down Side: The LegalZoom documents cost $139… each. Each county may have different charges for filing paperwork of any kind, and there are also state fees.

An easy and practical option is to keep your name the same, but let your friends and family know that you are planning to hyphenate/change your name when time or money allows. All of our letters that come from our loved ones are now addressed to ‘The Campbell-Greenes’, but our bills and business stuff still have our legal non-hyphenated names.

If you do decide to change or hyphenate, it is a good idea to speak with an accountant first just to make sure it isn’t going to cause any problems when it comes to filing your taxes.

What extra steps do we need to take if we are married in a state that doesn’t recognize our marriage?

President Obama, through legislation, has made sure that LGBTQ couples can visit their significant others while in the hospital, that does not mean everything is hunky-dory in ‘Mo-Town. The most important documents you can obtain are your Power of Attorney and the Advanced Directive (also called a Living Will). This will allow you or your partner to make medical and financial decisions on the other’s behalf. Most urban cities have lawyers that specialize in LGBTQ rights, regardless of legal marriage status. These lawyers, like most specialty lawyers, are a wee bit expensive. If you are doing more than POA and Advanced Directives, I would highly recommend speaking to one of these lawyers for advice. However, these two documents can be filed on legal websites like Legal Zoom for a lower cost. Deborah and I filed on legal zoom for less than $200. It is also a good idea to get a mini-version of these documents to carry with you in your wallet. [Editor’s Note: GLAD and NCLR not only have amazingtip-sheets, but are great resources. Also consider LAMBDA Legal for finding legal help and info on finding representation. Protect yourself and your baby family.]

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Ok, Team Practical. You may not have advice on planning a LGBTQ Wedding that you want to share (or maybe you do!). So feel free to share what you learned during APW Pride week, gay, straight, or in between…. And then, go spend the weekend celebrating freedom, and thinking about how much work we’ll still need to do to make sure the US really is a country of freedom for all.

]]>http://apracticalwedding.com/2011/07/ask-team-practical-michelle-on-lgbtq-weddings/feed/64Choosing Gay Babieshttp://apracticalwedding.com/2011/06/gay-babie/
http://apracticalwedding.com/2011/06/gay-babie/#commentsThu, 30 Jun 2011 16:30:50 +0000http://apracticalwedding.com/?p=14016APW sponsor Kelly Prizel is here, talking about her thought process on having Gay Babies. Reading her post, I really thought about my fertility situation and resolved once again, not to take it for granted. But more than that, I was struck by how similar we all are, at our core.…

APW sponsor Kelly Prizel is here, talking about her thought process on having Gay Babies. Reading her post, I really thought about my fertility situation and resolved once again, not to take it for granted. But more than that, I was struck by how similar we all are, at our core. I was struck by how the overwhelming terror of pondering children is just the same, gay or straight. It’s just when you’re gay, it’s way, way, more complicated logistically, right from the get-go. So, here is Kelly, talking about one of my favorite things in the whole world, babies with two mommies:

So maybe you were expecting a drama-filled post about the struggle with my family being upset that I’m considering having children. Gay babies. Gaybies. And there is that. But actually, right now, I care a whole lot less about what other people are thinking and a whole lot more about me. Because I don’t know what the f*ck I think. I’m paralyzed. And I’m paralyzed by something that I’ve been trying to promote and push for my entire life: choice.

It wasn’t too long ago that there weren’t that many options for two women who wanted to have a baby. Doctors refusing treatment; sperm banks not working with lesbians. There just weren’t choices. And in some countries and states, that’s still unfortunately the case. So I am thankful that I have so many options. But it’s killing me. I feel like I’m in the oft-cited survey where people were shown a table with six jars of jam and others were shown a table with 24 jars of jam. The people shown only six jars bought more jam. I would like to buy some jam. But there seem to be 500 different kinds.

Growing up, I thought you got married, got pregnant, you had a baby, TADA! There were no such thing as miscarriages, infertility, and certainly not gay people trying to have babies. And sometimes I get angry that I can’t just have a romance-filled night, and suddenly, whoops, I’m pregnant! And while some straight people have to go down the path of medical intervention and testing and stuff, most start out with this happy, beautiful dream. But I don’t get that dream. I’ll never get the privilege of looking at my baby and guessing if his or her eyes are from my wife and if his or her toes are from me. Once, when I was talking to one of my best friends about this and how much I want our donor to look like Natalie, I started sobbing when Natalie said in a matter-of-fact way, “Well, it won’t ever look exactly like me.” Because I struggle with trying to make that dream happen even though it’s not realistic. It still hovers in the back of my mind– if I find just the right donor, or if I find just the right fertility treatment, if I do things just right the baby will look like our baby.

With all these choices, a few have already been made for us. I will carry the baby because Natalie has an autoimmune disease that won’t allow her to go off her pills. I secretly don’t want anyone to know I’m pregnant. I don’t want random people coming up to me and Natalie and asking “Who’s the real mom?,” or worse, people we know thinking of Natalie as “the other mom.”

Another choice that’s already been made is that all my medical professionals are telling me to have a baby ASAP because I have a bleeding disorder that only gets worse with age, so my risks go up as I wait. Aside from those few things, everything is in the air.

Do we have a known donor? An unknown donor? If we have a known donor, as I have in my dream scenario, we legally put ourselves in a situation where our baby could be taken away from us. What kind of role would this known donor play? What would he be called? Would he come to family functions? And how do you even ask or pick someone that you know, and be like “Hey, wanna be my baby-daddy?”

Do we want to go all out at first? Our dream scenario because of my health issues/career would be for me to have twins: one with my egg and one with Natalie’s. But that requires a whole hell of a lot of medical intervention. My health insurance currently would cover this, but we only have this insurance until Natalie finishes her PhD which is 4 more years max. So do we try the turkey-baster method first? Or do I have doctors all up in my yin-yang right from the start to make sure we can have this covered? Not to mentioned that Natalie would have to be harvested like an egg-hen. I can’t imagine two women on fertility drugs together. We might kill each other.

And then, when it comes down to it, what are we looking for in a sperm donor? What compromises do we have to make? What’s unrealistic? Do we go for personality and feel if we have a known donor? Or just try to find a donor with the stats that are similar to Natalie’s: brown hair, blue eyes, Jewish, nerdy. Oh, and short.

Honestly, when we first started thinking about babies, I googled if there was any way Natalie and I could merge our eggs and have a child. I shit you not…I was willing to go to a third world country if necessary to have some mad scientist make me a baby. It turns out, they’ve tried with mice, and the results aren’t so great. And we’re not mice. Darn. But really, all these choices, all these options that we value as feminists have me frozen in place. Which path to go down? How will I know it’s right? How do we even start?

All of this has me thinking, “Do I even want a baby?” I like Natalie a whole lot, and we work daily on simplicity in our lives. This sh*t is not simple.

I’m a little absurdly excited about today’s post. I know, I know, but I just am. Michelle (the one in the red shrug, for those of you who like to know these things) and I have been friends since back in her NYU days, and my slightly-past-NYU professional NYC theatre days.…

I’m a little absurdly excited about today’s post. I know, I know, but I just am. Michelle (the one in the red shrug, for those of you who like to know these things) and I have been friends since back in her NYU days, and my slightly-past-NYU professional NYC theatre days. Michelle is hilarious (and will be back tomorrow co-hosting Ask Team Practical with Alyssa… yeahhhh, it’s gonna be good), and we used to be on an email list together, back in Web 1.0, about Television Without Pity, and American Idol. We’ve logged many a snarky writing hour together. She’s also a writer for So You’re EnGAYged, but I knew her first, so I’m borrowing her today! So I’m thrilled to bring you Michelle and Deborah’s theatre-kid wedding. It’s a story of learning to own your power, to stand up for yourself without apology, and, well, cutting cakes with swords. So. The important stuff.

Deborah and I met in a summer community theatre production of Thoroughly Modern Millie just two months after I had moved back home to Texas. I had been living my dream life in New York City, interning for a Broadway PR company and attending NYU. Then I got hit by a drunk driver while I was in a cab in Long Island. Due to the accident and resulting knee injury, I moved back in with my parents so I could go through physical therapy. I was broken, mentally and physically. So, I did what any good theatre kid does when they are feeling down in the dumps– I auditioned for a musical.

Deborah and I spent a lot of time together during the production, and after months of friendship, flirting and late nights watching The X-Files, we started dating in October 2007. By July of 2008, we were already discussing our futures together.

We both came from very traditional families, so I don’t think we ever considered *not* getting married. To us, the fact that we were two women living in a state that constitutionally bans gay marriage didn’t phase us at all. We proposed to each other in September 2008 after a completely serious discussion over the appropriate minimum length of dating time required prior to an engagement (see? traditional).

Now, having been a wedding junkie since the tender age of 10, I jumped head first into wedding planning. The funny thing about planning our wedding was how much I grew-up during the process. Sure, in the general day to dayness of your twenties you learn about compromise, sacrifice, dreams and goals. Somehow, our wedding put that learning curve on hyper-drive and sent me sky-rocketing into full fledged honest to goodness adulthood. In planning our wedding, we were defining ourselves. That doesn’t mean our wedding defined who we were to other people. What I mean is that our wedding helped define our roles as wife and wife.

There were a lot of DIY projects for the wedding. The biggest project was making our bouquets. Deborah, being the responsible person she is, didn’t want to spend loads of money on flowers because…well, flowers die. We ended up making both of our bouquets and all of our bridesmate bouquets. When I say we, what I really mean is me and our bridesmate Sarah. Deborah is not a crafty person. She is logical and rational and can do things with our monthly expense budget that I would never be able to, but the woman can’t tie a bow to save her life. This, very surprisingly, turned out to be extremely frustrating.

Equally frustrating was the assumption from friends and family that because we are both women, we would be equally awesome at doing crafty, artistic things. The whole gender-role wedding issues arose on more than one occasion, but I eventually learned that our loved ones weren’t trying to be rude. It never made the questions less annoying, but once I realized they were coming from genuine curiosity or confusion, I was able to have honest conversations with people. I would calmly explain that just because Deborah is not a DIY genius doesn’t mean she cares less about the wedding. It didn’t mean she was ‘acting like the groom’ who didn’t care what ‘the bride’ did (which is just a gross assumption, gay or straight). She just wasn’t (isn’t) crafty.

That being said, accepting and loving my significant other’s shortcomings, no matter how trivial they may be, was a difficult process. Especially when it was 2 a.m. and I was covered in tiny hot glue gun burns and asking Deborah if she could just maybe help with these motherf&*ing bouquets this ONE TIME?! When her flower looked more like a five year old’s art project over the solar system, I couldn’t be mad. I wanted to be mad! I wanted to say that I was doing all of the work and pout, but where would that get us? I would be upset and Deborah would feel bad about herself, but she wouldn’t magically become a DIY expert just because I threw a hissy fit. So, I fixed her sad little flower, and she kept me company and helped where she could. That would be what we educators call “a teaching moment”.

Navigating a wedding with two ladies in a state where homosexuality was actually illegal twenty years ago is a bit… tricky. So is dealing with parents who refuse to recognize you as their daughter’s fiancee. I would love to say that we took Deborah’s parents refusal to participate in or even acknowledge our wedding in stride. We didn’t. We are still struggling with it today. For a time, their lack of support, though expected, affected how we dealt with other people outside of friends and my family. Deborah and I would sort of try to skirt the whole ‘how do you feel about gay weddings?‘ conversations when we would first talk to vendors. For a while, I felt like the ‘gay’ thing should only be discussed in whispered conversations. After all, it was whispered conversation between Deborah’s family.

When Prop 8 passed, something else shifted in the way Deborah and I handled our wedding planning. For two people who have always tried to do ‘the right thing’, it seemed like our wedding was everything but. Sometimes, we felt like the whole world didn’t want us to get married. That idea did some terrible things to our self-esteem. When speaking to vendors, heck even distant friends sometimes, I would mention it was a gay wedding and then mentally prepare myself for a slap in the face. It almost was like we were asking permission to get married from every person we encountered. It was strange and very self-demeaning. When I think about it now, it makes me nauseous.

After a particularly tense episode surrounding a trip to visit Deborah’s family for Christmas, we reached our emotional limit. Yes, it hurt that an entire side of her family would not be a part of our wedding or our life, but we couldn’t let that keep us from celebrating the family and love we had. We got sick of feeling like our wedding didn’t hold the same weight as other weddings. I then went to the other extreme and got a little angry and militant. This too was a strange reaction, and any psychology major would be able to scream “DEFENSE MECHANISM” , WHAT?! Eventually, like goldilocks, we found the ‘just right’ form of interaction with others. For us, that was balls-to-the-wall-bluntness. Bluntness, not to be confused with anger, prevented many awkward situations and stupid questions, especially from vendors ( Are y’all having a double wedding? Are y’all sisters?).

I always assumed, like most people do, that Smalltown, Texas, is not a welcoming place for the LGBT community. I am happy to report that my assumption was for the most part wrong. Once we got over our issues and started treating ourselves the way we deserved to be treated (i.e. engaged, happy couple), I found that people we didn’t know were excited for us and vendors were thrilled to work with us. It made the whole planning experience strangely empowering. Getting to that place was a journey and even though I knew Deborah and I were married couple material, it was on that journey we realized who we really were and how we worked as a couple.

Once we stopped thinking of our wedding as a ‘gay wedding’ and started see it for what it really was, OUR wedding, everything fell into place. Sure, the day we got married had a few mishaps. We had a bridesmate go M.I.A., a fair share of ‘no show’ wedding guests and I hated the boutonnieres so much that I made our male bridesmates take them off immediately following the ceremony.

Yet, every ounce of stress or anxiety melted when I saw Deborah for the first time that day. Our photographer encouraged us to do a ‘first look’ and I am so glad we did. Those first few minutes made our wedding day a reality instead of this whirl of activity and emotions. Neither of us were prepared for how momentous or meaningful it would be. I would highly encourage any couple to try and do a first look if they can arrange it. After our first look, things moved quickly from photos to ceremony to reception, but even though the hours flew by I feel like the moments did not. Just for the record, I call ‘shennanigans‘ on anyone who tries to tell you that you won’t remember your wedding day!

So, if I could offer advice to anyone getting married it would be this: Don’t let anybody make you feel like you are less than an amazing human being or less than a beautiful loving couple. Regardless of whatever may be stressing you out right now, know that your wedding will be remarkable.

I promise you that all the bullshit that surrounds your wedding won’t matter once you walk down the aisle; because you will be just minutes away from marrying not only the person you love, but the person who makes you feel like you could run a marathon, broken knee be damned.

Other cool stuff we should know about: It snowed the morning of our outdoor ceremony. Our recessional song was Kiss by Prince, our wedding planner was nervous the song was a little too risque…

One sentence sum up of the wedding vibe: An intimate, DIY, family affair that was a little bit hippie a little bit urban and a lot a bit LOVE.

Favorite thing about the wedding: Handmade ceremony programs printed on vintage handkerchiefs (blood sweat and tears, and went like hotcakes as our guests hoarded them). Shaneequa getting to DJ her own reception—setting the tone of the party.

]]>http://apracticalwedding.com/2011/06/wordless-wedding-jacquetta-shaneequa/feed/59Lesbian Wifehttp://apracticalwedding.com/2011/06/lesbian-wife/
http://apracticalwedding.com/2011/06/lesbian-wife/#commentsWed, 29 Jun 2011 11:30:10 +0000http://apracticalwedding.com/?p=14028This morning’s post is from Elizabeth at A Homegrown Wedding. Her pondering on finding a way to be a wife on our own terms strikes to the core of what Reclaiming Wife has always been about for me. Being a bride is tricky and culturally loaded, but being a wife seems so much more complicated.…

This morning’s post is from Elizabeth at A Homegrown Wedding. Her pondering on finding a way to be a wife on our own terms strikes to the core of what Reclaiming Wife has always been about for me. Being a bride is tricky and culturally loaded, but being a wife seems so much more complicated. Though, these days, watching so many of you own the term, I’m honored to be in your company. So take it away, Elizabeth:

I’m not a wife yet; I must wait until August 20th to officially claim the title. Though, technically, I can’t get legally married so I don’t feel bad claiming my wifeliness a little early, although I have been “domesticated” in the state of Washington.

I started to reclaim what being a wife meant a long time ago, I think I was 14 when I first started to think about what it meant to be a wife and be gay. I don’t think my 14 year old self is alone in struggling with how sexuality and a future baby family mesh together. My mom was the classic wife; homemade bread and cookies, dinner on the table by 5:30, and an abundant garden. Incidentally, she reclaimed wife in her own right as a product of the woman’s movement in the 70’s. She left her full-time, paycheck-producing job to be a stay-at-home-mom in 1990. Our culture is full of images of what a “good wife” looks like, but have you ever seen a “good gay wife”? Is there such a thing? I’ve spent the past 10 years looking for an image of the kind of wife I want to be. I’m not a stone butch lesbian, and my stiletto skills can’t hold a candle to The L Word Divas. Most days, I trade in my lipstick for an organic lipgloss, but I have a really great haircut and can rock a scarf better than Julia Roberts (not that she is gay, but we can hope right?). I love to cook (real food, from scratch), can’t wait to have kids, and would give anything to have the kind of life where I can stay home with the kids and write a cookbook for a living.

Somehow the LGBTQ community, which has spent years breaking down stereotypes, has very strongly held parameters for what it means to be a lesbian, and my rather classic and traditional personal expectations of being a wife doesn’t mesh. I am simultaneously not gay enough to be a good lesbian, and not straight enough to be a good wife. So that leaves me paving my own wifely path. I come from a new generation of lesbians that grew up in a slightly more welcoming culture. My family never told me that I wasn’t going to be able to have my own family and my parents never worried that they wouldn’t have grandchildren. I’ve always known that I could have whatever kind of life I wanted, that my sexuality and my life choices aren’t inextricably linked, unless I wanted them to be. Intellectually, I know there must be other LGBTQ individuals with a similar perspective out there, yet without a booth at Pride it’s hard to find each other. A Google search for “lesbian wife” returns voyeuristic romance novels and chat rooms full of angry husbands. It would seem that these two words don’t go together in a very positive way.

So, I’m not so much reclaiming wife, as I am creating wife. When you really think about it though, isn’t that what we are all doing? Creating ourselves and creating a space to be the kind of wife we want to be.

So, for APW Pride week, we’re brainstorming ways to honor marriage equality at our weddings. Some of us want to be really loud about it, sometimes we want to be slightly more subtle about it… and sometimes (us, cough, cough) we think we want to be subtle and then when push comes to shove, we decide f*ck subtle.…

(And, please stay away from the should-you-do-something-or-not debate on this thread. That decision should be left up to each individual couple. This is *just* a thread to brainstorm ideas of what to do, if you’re choosing to do something.)

Today, after sharing some of her wedding service yesterday, we get wedding grad Cindy (she’s the one in the strapless dress)! Cindy hosts APW meet-ups in Chicago, leaves awesome comments, and is in general, awesome. So I was pretty excited for her post from the get-go.…

Here’s how we planned our wedding: one hot summer afternoon, we were chilling on the beach, five blocks from our condo, talking about what we might want our wedding to be like. I can’t remember which one of us noticed the pier to our left, but we decided to go check it out. And it was perfect. The pier was V-shaped, which meant we could each have our own aisle, with guests on both sides, and meet in the middle to get married with the Chicago skyline in the background. Hello? This is the stuff that fantasy (lesbian) weddings are made of.

Next, we needed a reception spot, so we kept our eyes peeled as we started to walk home. Half a block from the beach was a restaurant we’d never been to, offering a 3-course prix fixe menu for $18 everyday. So we ate there that night, loved the food and the wine selections, and pretty much decided on the spot that it was the right spot. This is pretty much how all of our planning went – something or someone seemed perfect for us, and it was. From an awesome photographer who specializes in LGBT events/theatre/weddings (um, we were lesbian stage managers getting married, so he was pretty much perfect) to an eco-friendly florist willing to work with our tiny budget to the shocking ease of Chicago Park District permits, everything just fell right into place. And we all lived happily ever after. The End.

(Just kidding.)

While the paragraph above is totally true, not everything was quite so simple. Here are my biggest takeaways:

You will be joyfully overwhelmed and surprised. We knew that our friends and families were excited about us getting married, but we never imagined the magnitude of love we’d feel from them on our wedding day. It was indescribably awesome to have so many people we love in one place celebrating with us.

When I think back to how I felt on the day, the morning seems twice as long as the afternoon and evening combined. We actually had a lot of down time in the morning before we needed to get ready, which you’d think would help get the wedding zen going, but I got antsy and nervous. Once I started actually getting dressed and doing my makeup, that’s when I got really calm and just felt READY. After that, the rest of the day flew by in a whirlwind. I was so excited that I sped down the aisle, and then had to awkwardly wait for my bride to meet me in the middle. The ceremony seemed to end almost as soon as it started. Before we knew it, we were cutting the cake and dancing and toasting and falling into (our own bed at home – woot!) exhausted.

On (the lack of) marriage equality. When we became engaged in 2007, our plan was to wait until we could legally marry each other in the state where we lived before throwing a wedding. When the Prop 8 fight started and gay marriage politics heated up across the nation, we dared to hope it might even be pretty soon. But after nearly three years of engagement, we were tired of waiting (and extremely sick of correcting people who assumed our fiances were male) and we really, really just wanted to be married!

The words matter. We asked a good friend of ours to officiate our ceremony, and his wife (who is a writer) to help me write and edit it. (Can I just say it rocks to have someone who knows you so well leading you through your wedding?) Creating our ceremony from scratch was no small undertaking, but it forced us to really think about what we wanted the foundation of our marriage to be, and how we wanted to incorporate our community into it. It was so worth it. I highly recommend it if you are at all inclined towards writing.

As part of our ceremony, we decided make our own marriage license, since we couldn’t get a legally-binding one from the State of Illinois. Borrowing from Jewish and Quaker traditions, we created a contract that included our vows along with the signatures of all our guests as witnesses. We took it with us on our Boston honeymoon, and after our legal ceremony there, we had our Justice of the Peace sign it too. It may be our favorite part of the wedding. We’ve got it hanging on our living room wall, where we can see it all the time and be reminded of our vows and all the love and support we have from our community.

I’d like to share a little bit of our ceremony here, because I think it says a lot about the character of our wedding (and it’s my favorite part and I’m really proud of it!) The first paragraph was written entirely by our friend, and brought us to tears.

I probably don’t need to remind you that you’ve come here on Independence Day weekend. We stand here on the Third Coast of America, on the banks of Lake Michigan from which the land stretches west to the Pacific and east to the Atlantic. We have the unique perspective, here in the middle of the nation, to see America for what it is, laid out before us. Amidst all the fireworks and BBQs and running from here to there, what is the freedom that we’re celebrating? Because freedom for some is not freedom at all. But that’s ok. Because to those who might oppose why we’re here today, I have one thing to say: you’ve already lost. Our generation doesn’t care. Despite all the sham and drudgery in this world, we realize that love, where it can be found, should be revered, protected, and consecrated. Period.

So, although the state and federal governments will not recognize it for a few more years, we pronounce you married now. Today, we are the legislators who will issue the marriage license, by the power vested in our Commonwealth, and we are the enforcers of the law who will hold Cindy and Julia to their vows in the years to come.

(Here we signed our license, followed by our officiant and our two best people.)

By the power unlawfully seized by me, in defiance of the State of Illinois’ laws prohibiting marriage equality, it is my great pleasure to declare you MARRIED!

And I have to tell you, although I most certainly felt married after our wedding in Chicago, when our Justice of the Peace in Boston declared us legally married, I was overwhelmed with the power of that statement.

You need a wedding stage manager. Even (or perhaps especially) if, like us, you’re two stage managers marrying each other, a wedding stage manager is not optional. Not because you need someone to plan your wedding for you, because, duh, you can totally do that all by yourself. But because it’s the best thing ever to hand over the schedule and the guest list and the bag full of just-in-case stuff to somebody else, who you trust to deal with whatever, so that you and your almost-spouse can be really present in every moment. Get one now!

Some people suck, and they don’t suck any less just because it’s your wedding day. This is an oft-repeated bit of solid advice on APW, so I’ll skip the preaching and get right to our personal stories. When my sister got married two years before me, my parents and I had a knock-down, drag-out fight about me being gay, which ended in my mother telling me that under no circumstance would she attend a wedding where I married another woman, and my then-fiance kicking her out of our condo while wearing only a towel. (It was a seriously film-worthy scene there that we really should write down at some point.) So, we were fully expecting that they would not be in attendance at the wedding. We sent them a save-the-date and an invite anyway. They failed to RSVP. About six weeks before the wedding, my mom (a calligrapher) sent me a Facebook message (right?!) to ask how my invitations were coming along and offered to address them for us. Which obviously threw me for a big loop.

I let my mom do the lettering (which was beautiful) and asked if she might want to do our license as well. Big mistake. She showed up the weekend of the wedding without having done it. Luckily, I know my mom pretty well, and had a backup plan for printing it at Kinkos. After all that, my parents were well-behaved (though my dad was sorely underdressed), and seemed happy for me, but chose not to sign their names as witnesses to our marriage. Suffice it to say that the drama around their attendance was stressful at best.

Meanwhile, Julia had her own drama going on. Her best person failed to plan (financially) for attending the wedding or to ask us for help getting her to Chicago, and after a pretty big fight, we ended up asking her not to come. Another friend stepped in and on we went.

I suppose it was our decision not to let these things upset us on our wedding day. But honestly? We were wrapped up in so much love and joy that we hardly spent a moment thinking about it.

But most of your people are awesome, so don’t underestimate them. We were fortunate to have lots of support from Julia’s parents, and that was crucial in dealing with the lack of support from mine. My best friend and my siblings were also there for me, and that was really important too. They hovered around us and refused to stop helping. They fed us, ran to the grocery store for more cake ingredients, did my hair, helped put finishing touches on our dresses, and generally kept us sane and relaxed all weekend. A professional stage manager friend of ours managed our wedding; others saved us an insane holiday delivery fee from the chair rental place by loaning their cars and selves to schlep them about; my brother-in-law took over the grill at our welcome party while we dealt with an irate neighbor; a cousin who used to be a club DJ manned the iPod at the reception; my sister volunteered to be our designated driver; an out-of-town friend sat in our living room making white knots for us on the crazy dress-finishing/cake baking day; the list goes on and on. Your friends and family love you and they want your wedding day to be awesome almost as much as you do. When they offer to help, don’t say no!

There will be stuff that doesn’t go according to plan. Try not to lose your sh*t about it. I made our wedding cake. It was three tiers (chocolate/mocha, vanilla/berry, and pumpkin/ginger) and it took about 10 hours to make on the day before the wedding. After having a near meltdown about uneven layers, and baking two extra ones to even things out (I am really anal about some things, ok?), the cake was looking good. But at some point during the five block drive to the restaurant, the entire cake had shifted and was smooshed up against the side of the box. For some reason, my imperfect layers had caused tears, but I found the fallen cake hilarious. We planned to fix it the next day, but when we arrived to do so, I was too thrilled about getting married to give a damn what it looked like anymore! Julia and I figured no one would care as long as it tasted amazing (and it did), so we said “Eff that!” And we still think it’s really, really funny.

I could write a whole post about the projects we took on for our wedding, but I’m just going to say that we each made our own dresses; I also made a corset to wear under mine. I designed our save-the-dates, invitations, thank you cards, and website; we self-catered our welcome party; and (obviously) I made our wedding cake. (And then broke it.)

Your wedding will be exactly as awesome as you decide to make it. Make the decisions you want and then own them. Relax, find your wedding zen, be in the moment, and bask in the love. And then? Enjoy the party!

]]>http://apracticalwedding.com/2011/06/wedding-graduates-cindy-julia/feed/91Wedding Undergraduate: Growth & Separationhttp://apracticalwedding.com/2011/06/gay-wedding-plannin/
http://apracticalwedding.com/2011/06/gay-wedding-plannin/#commentsMon, 27 Jun 2011 16:00:21 +0000http://apracticalwedding.com/?p=14091It seemed logical to kick of APW Pride week with a wedding planning post from an LGBTQ perspective. So I’m delighted to bring you Nicole’s post about learning to merge families that don’t necessarily want to be merged, and about finding a way to build your own support when you need it.…

It seemed logical to kick of APW Pride week with a wedding planning post from an LGBTQ perspective. So I’m delighted to bring you Nicole’s post about learning to merge families that don’t necessarily want to be merged, and about finding a way to build your own support when you need it. Plus, as a bonus, it include’s Nicole and Annie’s brilliant idea of the Team Leader approach to family problem solving (must start using this ASAP).

Nineteen months ago, my girlfriend, Annie, asked me to go on a midnight walk in the middle of a blizzard in her hometown. We held hands and laughed as we trekked down to a park, feet freezing and eyelashes full of snowflakes. Being the romantic she is, I didn’t find it odd when she started asking me questions about our relationship. When she asked, “What’s your favorite thing about me?” (I promise, she’s not a narcissist) and I responded, “Your questions,” I probably should have known that the next thing out of her mouth would be “I have a very important question for you. Will you marry me?” While I was thrilled to say yes, what I didn’t expect was how this question – will you marry me? Are you ready to be married? Would reverberate through my family in hurtful ways through the next year and a half.

We learned very quickly that engagements and weddings and marriages are not just about the two individuals who decide to enter into them. They are, incredibly, about families. In both actual weddings and the blog world, family relationships are thrust into a unique spotlight, for good and obvious reasons. In my experience, these narratives seem to occupy one of two extremes when the engaged discuss family relationships. At one extreme, the discussion seems to surround the people who are close to their family. They have lovely, glowing wedding celebrations that are true mergings of two families, and everyone cries tears of joy and makes ludicrous demands about Jordan almond favors and gives toasts that pull on the heartstrings. At the other extreme stand the brave individuals that speak openly about deep and painful estranged relationships, biological parents that aren’t in the picture, and parents who have not been in the same room for decades. I can only imagine how heartbreaking it could be to deal with issues of this nature while planning for a marriage. I try to beat down my envy for those in the first camp, and I give major props to the second for their honesty and courage. But what about the space in-between the extremes? What happens when members of your family of origin are simply pretending that you aren’t engaged? When they refuse to fully support openness and authenticity for people who are not straight? When they don’t seem to support their children’s progress into adulthood and marriage?

What do you do with that?

Over the course of our engagement, Annie and I have learned a tremendous amount about our relationship dynamics, our goals for ourselves both as individuals and as a couple, and our relationship to our faith tradition. But above all things, our engagement has been a serious study of what it means to be and to become family.

When Annie and I told her parents that we were engaged, their basic reaction was: well, we were kind of expecting this! Then they ordered us champagne at dinner. Since then, they have been steadily supportive and excited about our impending marriage. When we told my mother, she simply cried. When we told my father, he smiled grimly and went upstairs. Since then, the crying and silence has taken on other forms.

My family does not approve of our decision to get married. Their disapproval stems from a variety of sources, including the emotional wounds of divorce, a cultural Catholic heritage, and the belief that we are too young to marry. For the most part, my family and I disagree over what marriage is, can be, or the role it should play in my existing family. Over the course of our engagement, these differences came into sharp focus, and have left us feeling very alone in the planning process.

In the aftershocks of my family’s disapproval, I am beginning to deal with expectations that I cannot meet. It has forced me to confront the fact that I am not a mere product of my family of origin, and that I am an adult who is fully capable of her own wise decisions. In my family, adulthood and independence are not a given. They are lived and struggled into, after being voluntarily chosen.

And of course, this hasn’t just affected me; this affects my partner in a different but equally serious fashion. Annie has been slowly coming to understand that some members of my family may never include her with open arms. This is an incredibly painful, but realistic possibility that we are both still coming to terms with. This process may be gradual, but it is steadily moving us to a newer understanding and clarification about who we are, what we love, and what we stand for.

I firmly believe that weddings (among other things) are about disparate families coming together to become one melded whole. However, my own experience is living proof that sometimes, this is not actually possible. People must have the desire to be joined, to be open to others. If this desire is imbalanced, the enterprise is guaranteed to fail.

Building a family (along with planning a wedding, ironically enough) is really difficult. But it’s the most immensely worthwhile thing that I have done with my life up to this point. It is a constant discussion, with active listening and storytelling. It means reevaluating our goals, hopes, and values to be sure we’re on the same page. It’s a crash course in an examination of boundaries between the families we come from and the families we are creating. One of the best pieces of advice I’ve received is to treat our families the following way: each of us is the “team leader” for our respective families, but we are on one “team.” Certain situations need to be tackled by the team leader alone; other situations require the whole team’s input. I am also learning that I am not responsible for providing my partner with a happy, healthy, loving extended family. That’s something I have no control over, though I do have control over the way that I interact with them and the way that I honor her as my first priority.

Annie and I decided to grow a garden this spring. With excitement, we planted seeds in late winter and incubated them in a small indoor greenhouse. We watched the cucumber and tomato plants sprout. We carefully planted them in larger containers and have nurtured and watered these plants daily. It’s come time to separate a few of the small plants and once again place them into larger pots. We’ve hesitated for a few days now because we know, in a few instances, that the roots have become intertwined. We know that pulling the plants away from one another could be damaging. Roots are the foundation and source of nourishment, and they run deep. But unless they move into pots of their own, they will never be strong enough to bear fruit. We will take our time in doing this. We will be careful. What nature has so beautifully reminded us of is that new growth requires separation.

Today marks the beginning of the first ever APW LGBTQ Pride Week, right after a heady weekend of New York legalizing gay marriage (yeahhhhhhhhh!), San Francisco Pride. I’m more than a little excited about it all of it.…

Today marks the beginning of the first ever APW LGBTQ Pride Week, right after a heady weekend of New York legalizing gay marriage (yeahhhhhhhhh!), San Francisco Pride. I’m more than a little excited about it all of it. I might also still be a little tipsy from all of it (couldn’t say).

There is always a whole ton of debate (inside my head, at the very least) as to whether or not it’s appropriate to ever single out the LGBTQ community here in wedding land. The truth is, there is a lot of power in normalization. We run LGBTQ weddings just like mixed-gender weddings, every month here on APW. We don’t single them out as special or different. We use gender inclusive language all the time, not just when we’re talking about gay and queer couples. I wrotemy book with gender neutral language throughout, and with gay couples featured the same way as straight couples, but without any section on gay marriage. Why? Well, I think that slow cultural infiltration may have more power when reaching a mainstream audience, than hitting them over the head with your views. You have a huge gay wedding section? They might not buy the book. You quietly trot out quotes by happily married gay women, and only use gender neutral language? Well, you have a chance of winning hearts and minds. Because, why yes, these women are just like you.

And yet. We have an LGBTQ weddings tab on the APW toolbar, and we’re doing APW Pride week. Why is that? Well, it’s because we’re not there yet. When we started pondering APW Pride, after Cindy brought it up to me, we started digging around in our submissions, and the simple facts are these: we had one LGBTQ Wedding Graduate (Cindy), zero LGBTQ wedding planning posts, zero LGBTQ Reclaiming Wife posts, zero posts on LGBTQ families, and zero advice questions from LGBTQ readers. For those of you doing the math at home, that means that out of hundreds of submissions, we had exactly one from an LGBTQ perspective. And that is in no way reflective of the makeup of our community.

We’re not there yet.

So we reached out to readers we knew, we reached out via Twitter, we chatted with a lot of people, and now we’re proudly (ha!) bringing you a full week of content from the LGBTQ perspective. It’s content that made me think about my own relationship, that made me grin, that called me to action (I marched in San Francisco’s Pride Parade yesterday, because of this project), and content that was just plain pretty. And as Lauren told me, every single post made her think really hard about her own, mixed-gender relationship. The LGBTQ perspective is so important for making all of our relationships stronger… even if we sometimes have to beat the bushes to get it submitted!

So why are we doing APW Pride Week? Because we need to. Because we’re not there yet. Because the content is just plain great. Because we still need to talk about this issue in a concerted, focused way (sometimes, at least). And because, I, for one, am proud, honored, and humbled to be part of a community that is vested in the civil disobedience that is gay marriage in the United States. Because f*ck legal. Legal can go ahead and catch up with us. As the officiant said at Cindy’s wedding (coming up tomorrow):

To those who might oppose why we’re here today, I have one thing to say: you’ve already lost. Our generation doesn’t care. Despite all the sham and drudgery in this world, we realize that love, where it can be found, should be revered, protected, and consecrated. Period.

So, although the state and federal governments will not recognize it for a few more years, we pronounce you married now. Today, we are the legislators who will issue the marriage license, by the power vested in our Commonwealth, and we are the enforcers of the law who will hold Cindy and Julia to their vows in the years to come.

By the power unlawfully seized by me, in defiance of the State of Illinois’ laws prohibiting marriage equality, it is my great pleasure to declare you MARRIED!

So this week, for Pride, we’re making the personal political. Wisely, beautifully, hilariously, gorgeously political. I’m so proud to be part of this community. Let’s do this thing.